Dorothy could. But social media cannot get over the rainbow, at the least when it comes to food: We see increasingly more of the coloration spectrum in our desserts, cookies, or even coffee. The remaining month, a Brooklyn store selling…

Dorothy could. But social media cannot get over the rainbow, at the least when it comes to food: We see increasingly more of the coloration spectrum in our desserts, cookies, or even coffee. The remaining month, a Brooklyn store selling rainbow bagels reported waits of 4 hours to get its neon creations. And the remaining week, a polychromatic grilled cheese lit up the net. That grown-u.s.have an appetite for nostalgic kid cuisine is nothing new, but recently, it’s as though Funfetti is a virus, and nothing fit to be eaten is immune.

There are cake balls that appear as even though they’ve been crafted from Play-Doh. Tie-dyed waffles, psychedelic s’mores. Orange peels filled with every shade of Jell-O. Multicolored cookie parfait. Cakes with white frosting, however, whilst you slice into them — surprise! A really perfect ROYGBIV. Now not even matzoh is secure.

For makers of colorful icings and meals dyes, it’s a pot of gold.

[Hands and bowls and melty cheese! Why does every Web recipe video look the same?]

“Each person has a nice feeling related to a rainbow. It’s a lovely factor,” said Beth Somers, director of creative content for Wilton Brands, a producer of cake decorating resources and ingredients. “It’s the type of an amusing factor to position it rights into a meals’ layout, and simply play with it.”

Wilton, which sells 24 gel-primarily based colorations that can be used in icing and baked goods, has been flooding its Instagram feed with ombré and rainbow-color recipes for domestic chefs to try, like its sweet curl rainbow cake and rainbow shot glasses. It markets its multilayer cake pan set as a device for making the popular rainbow layer cake that has to end up a stalwart of birthday events, same-sex weddings, and delight Week celebrations. Even though the enterprise has visible a sales growth in its icing colorations when you consider that 2013, a spokeswoman stated she could not live without delay characteristic it to the trend.

For a few of the recipes, the handiest special system you want is meals coloring. It’s “a little time in-depth, however, now not difficult. There’s nearly no talent to it in any respect,” said Somers. So Instagrammers — wherein these Rainbow-Brite-­inspired creations are surprisingly famous — get “a variety of visible bang in your buck,” said Somers. And plenty of bragging fodder, too: In our image-everything era, the rainbow dishes appear to be a shape of visual one-upmanship, with domestic cooks and professionals alike striving to make the maximum ideal-looking Crayola container of a cake.

“Sharing on social media, that’s one of these huge deal, the ‘appearance what I made, I made it myself,’” stated Somers. “I think humans get so much validation from that now.”

They like seeing what others can create, too.

“Seeing the colors flow of their dependent shape makes human beings sense excellent,” said Brittany Wright, a photographer whose Instagrams of rainbow-coloration meals, from vibrant citrus to prismatic popsicles, have earned her 160,000 fans.

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But no longer everybody feels desirable about it. In any case, the taste-the-rainbow-trend is at odds with the path our meal culture is taking.

It “seems to be going in opposition to the natural-meals trend, that is that a symphony of brown is something to be celebrated, ugly meals are delicious, heirlooms are lovely, and things don’t should appearance best,” said Tess Masters, the author of “The Blender woman,” a gluten-loose, vegan cookbook.

Consistent with 2015, have a look at patron reports, 62 percent of shoppers searching for our foods labeled “natural.” And forty-eight percentage assume it’s far “very vital” to keep away from artificial components, an end result 17 percent factors higher than inside the preceding year. Agencies such as Nestle and Kraft are phasing out artificial coloring in their products. Some recipes for these rainbow dishes have instructions for creating an all-natural spectrum in your plate — fruit salads organized according to hue, for instance. But all of that seems to go out the window when some other artificially colored confection receives the fingers-and-bowls viral video remedy.

To Masters, “it simply looks like an acidic orgy that’s going to result in cancer.” at some point of a 30-minute communique approximately rainbow food, Masters used the words “appalling,” “absolutely repulsive,” “juvenile” and, in case you still weren’t certain in which she stood on the matter: “it’s miles the worst factor,” she said. “I’m glad for you to quote me on that.”

Baked goods, where we’re used to seeing fanciful colorings, are one component. However, now there are rainbow savory meals, too. In addition to the aforementioned grilled cheese, there were two sorts of rainbow pizza. There’s also rainbow pasta, made by dumping cooked noodles into bags of food coloring and combining them for a plate that looks like a Brice Marden portrays. It’s handiest simply the start. Somers thinks we can see extra artificial rainbows at the dinner plate as chefs’ creativity reaches new and terrifying depths. What’s next: rainbow sausage? Rainbow lasagna? Rainbow coq au vin?

“Meat of any kind seems like it shouldn’t be rainbowed,” stated Somers.

Another hilarious — or unlucky, depending on your view — software of the trend is its affiliation with unicorns. That’s due, in part, to a web meme that says that the one-horned legendary creatures, um, excrete rainbows and glitter. In flip, which has come to be nomenclature for some of the rainbow-color desserts: A mound-formed sparkly, rainbow cookie known as Unicorn Poop turned into among the first of the multicolor creations to journey the recent wave. The paintings of l. a. baker Kristy Therrien (who has trademarked the term), the cookies have been featured on Anderson Cooper’s former speak show, “Anderson stay,” and have multiplied right into a line of baked goods that include candy-filled unicorn horns.

The meme even stimulated an advertising campaign for the Squatty Potty, a domestic rest room useful resource. A video depicting a unicorn, er, generating cones of rainbow tender-serve ice cream. “This is wherein your ice cream comes from the creamy poop of a mystic unicorn,” says the economic. Makes you observed two times about Instagramming that rainbow smoothie, proper?

Potty communication aside, many of those recipes aren’t always going to show out searching as precise as they do on-line. Meals styling recommendations and lighting fixtures can make the rainbow appear more colorful on a display than it’ll be on your common domestic prepare dinner’s kitchen. And as every kid with a multi-p.c. of Play-Doh learned early on: if you don’t keep things separate and instead blend each shade inside the rainbow together, you get a muddy, pukey, grey-brown. The capability for Pinterest Fails is high. For that grilled cheese, for instance, “your most effective going to get that rainbow with the cheese pull, and it’s certainly tough to do a perfect pull,” stated Somers, relating to the just-melted, oozy strands. “I don’t assume the visual wow is similar to whilst you cut into a cake.”